Biederman, Irving USC Image Understanding
<p>Jan 10, 2015 01:13 PM</p>
<p>
abstract for Jan 11 2015 talk is below:</p>
<p>
The presentation by Professor Irving Biederman, USC, is entitled “The Neural Basis of Shape Recognition”.</p>
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Whereas people can readily describe the differences between <b>two highly similar objects (such as birds on the same page in a bird guide)</b>, they are at a loss in describing the difference between the faces of Tom Cruise and John Travolta. </p>
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A remarkably simple account, based on early cortical spatial filtering, may be able to explain the ineffability of faces and a wide variety of other phenomena distinguishing face from object recognition, such as why the recognition of faces, but not objects, is so severely disrupted by contrast negation (as when viewing a photographic negative) and orientation inversion, and why faces, but not objects, are represented “configurally” (and what could “configural” possibly mean in neurocomputational terms?).</p>